Quotes from David Foster Wallace

The music's still going, going absolutely nowhere, like Philip Glass on Quaaludes.

Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED

sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

The drunk and the maimed both are dragged forward out of the arena like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether.

It's got something to do with love. With having the discipline to talk out of the part of yourself that can love instead of the part that just wants to be loved.

God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fair low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.

Fackelmann claimed to have started a Log just to keep track of Kite's attempted pickup lines -- surefire lines like e.g. 'You're the second most beautiful woman I've ever seen, the first most beautiful woman I've ever seem being former Bristish Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher,' and 'If you came home with me I'm unusually confident that I could achieve an erection,' and said that if Kite wasn't still cherry at twenty-three and a half it was proof of some kind of divine-type grace.

Am I happy? is one of those questions that, if it has got to be asked, more or less dictates its own answer.

Everybody who really wants to knows what's true. Most people just don't want to. It means listening from deep inside. Most people just don't want to. But the special people listen. You can hear what's true, inside. Listen.

No, you simply sit there with your arms crossed nodding with that timeless patience that communicates condescension and judgment without exposing you to responsibility for insinuating anything aloud.

bilateral illusion of unilateral attention

That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning tehy have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. That the cute Boston AA term for this is 'analysis paralysis.' ... That other people can often see things about you that you yourself canno see, even if those people are stupid ... That having a lot of money does not immunize people from suffering or fear. That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish.

Great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communication-theorists sometimes call "exformation," which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve.

The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges, and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made no sense.

Her expression is from Page 18 of the Victoria's Secret catalogue.

Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?

Our leaders, our government is us, all of us, so if they're venal and weak it's because we are.

It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy.

That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

He cranks the condo's AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you're dreading whatever you think of.

Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn't even know he believed until it exits his mouth in front of five anxious little hairless plump trusting clueless faces.

Over half the admits to psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol over a high-school breakup or gray lonely asexual depressing people rendered inconsolable by the death of a pet. The cathartic trauma of actually going in somewhere officially Psych-, some understanding nods, some bare indication somebody gives half a damn – they rally, back out they go.

We are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.

There are no choices without personal freedom…We say that one cannot be human without freedom…Your freedom is the freedom from, no one tells your precious individual USA selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint, and forced duress. But what of the freedom to? Not just free from. Not all compulsion comes from the without…how for the person to freely choose?